Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center gets $25 million bounce

Friday

Feb 28, 2014 at 5:36 PMFeb 28, 2014 at 5:50 PM

Pam Adams Journal Star education reporter @padamspam

PEORIA — Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center will get another $25 million bounce from its major benefactor, Jump Trading, a Chicago-based financial trading firm, to sponsor joint research projects between the innovation center and the University of Illinois College of Engineering at Champaign-Urbana.

Jump Trading also provided the initial $25 million to help build the $51 million innovation center, a collaboration between OSF Healthcare and the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria.

The latest gift, which requires OSF Healthcare to raise $25 million in matching funds, will help create a permanent endowment for Jump ARCHES, or Jump Applied Research for Community Health through Engineering and Simulation.

While the original collaboration between a healthcare system and the college of medicine is an obvious pairing, Jump ARCHES focuses on blending talents of practitioners in seemingly disparate fields — healthcare providers and engineers — ultimately to solve practical problems of training the next generation of medical professionals and providing better healthcare at lower costs.

Top administrators at OSF Healthcare, the University of Illinois and the school’s colleges of medicine and engineering announced the gift Friday during a reception at the Jump Center, located on the campus of OSF St. Francis Medical Center. The reception also served as the kick-off for OSF Healthcare Foundation’s campaign to raise the $25 million match.

“This is a dramatic expansion of our initial innovation agenda,” Dr. John Vozenilek, Jump’s chief medical officer, said in an interview before the reception.

The goal is strengthen an environment where medical professionals already work with engineers. They plan to broaden the work and the collaborating partners. Faculty from the U of I’s engineering department will be based at the center. Medical professionals will have an opportunity to work with all types of engineers, including computer scientists and mechanical, bio-medical and industrial engineers. The endowment will also award competitive research grants annually.

“This is unique, this is very different because of the strong coupling with clinical problems, clinical simulation and educational problems driving the research,” said Rashid Bashir, head of the department of bioengineering at the U of I.

Medical professionals pose problems for engineers to solve, he explained. They’ll research developing new tools, techniques and devices for use in several areas, including medical imaging and health information technology.

The Jump center is a virtual hospital equipped to simulate every stage of patient care, from simulated patients to simulated surgery. More than 40,000 people have visited the center for some type of training since it opened last year , according to Vozenilek. A 2013 study by two Bradley University economists estimated the Jump center could pump as much as $92 million into the Peoria economy by 2018.

Jump Trading has already donated $50 million.

“It’s really nice to have a wonderful donor such as Jump Trading that causes us to constantly think about how the work we do is relative to patients and reducing healthcare costs,” Vozenilek said.

Pam Adams can be reached at 686-3245 or padams@pjstar.com. Follow her on Twitter @padamspam.